Looking for the Tea Party Location Today

In the 1850 Boston Evening Transcript story about public memory of the Boston Tea Party that I quoted a couple of days ago, John Russell wrote: “Very few persons now know where to find Griffin’s Wharf, the name of which should have been preserved through all time.”

Boston had grown significantly between 1773 and the date of that article, grown even more since. The site of the tea destruction, the shallow water at low tide beside Griffin’s Wharf, has become dry land. But where exactly?

John Robertson has a website devoted to that question, considering many clues, false clues, and more or less reliable maps produced over the years. Since he first posted his findings, what was a vacant lot has become the site of the InterContinental Hotel Boston, 510 Atlantic Avenue. Under the western slice of that building, Robertson says, was where Griffin’s Wharf lay in 1773.

The tablet above is on 470 Atlantic Avenue, the brick building beside the chrome hotel. It was installed (on a predecessor to that building, numbered 495) as early as 1898 by the Massachusetts Society of the Sons of the American Revolution. The Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum is nearby in the channel.

Mapping the Battle of Bunker Hill

With the sestercentennial of June 1768 passing by, I have few days to devote to the Battle of Bunker Hill. But here’s Charles E. Frye’s map of that battle, completed in 2011 and available through Wikipedia. It’s unusual in positioning American army units on the Charlestown peninsula.

Frye is an army-trained cartographer. In this interview, Frye talked about how he came to make that map:

My wife suggested I help my oldest son with his 5th grade history project and that we could research to find out where [our ancestor] Isaac [Frye] was on the battlefield. Reading about the battle proved bewildering and disorienting. Therefore, my natural inclination was to make a map along with a timeline to organize that information. We started by mapping the Boston vicinity, including what was then known as the Charlestown Peninsula. Based on that and the major landmarks of the peninsula, we could then see the form of the battle and the sequence of events. My son hand-drew a one-page color map of the battle and wrote a short essay describing where Isaac most likely was located. We had narrowed it down to two possible locations. It took years before I finally located the documentation indicating which of the two was correct.

I ended up making my own map using GIS and because I learned the Library of Congress’s map division had copies of most of the maps depicting the battle, and already had a map-scanning program. GIS allows for scanned maps to be positioned relative to modern geographic data, which then could be used to create a historical map in the GIS. I knew a cartographer working at the Library of Congress, so I contacted her, and their staff bumped up the remaining maps of the battle so I could have faster access.

My map looked good to me, and it was rich with information. I shared it with the map division staff, and they liked it and cataloged a copy. However, the “Aha!” moment occurred for me two years later when I first visited the Bunker Hill Monument. There is a diorama there depicting the battle. Other than placement of the cannon, my map completely agreed with the diorama! How does a non-historian do that part-time in only a matter of months? With GIS of course. Mapping information in GIS forces rigor, which among other things affords efficiency because non-conforming information cannot be forced into database like it can be forced into a paragraph. I later published a data model and method for historians to use GIS in their work. I am happy to say many historians have since adopted, adapted, and expanded on that work.

Here’s more on Frye’s data model and method for others to use with G.I.S. systems.

A Souvenir of Harvard College in 1767

We have a good idea of what Massachusetts Hall and the rest of Harvard College looked like just before the Revolutionary War thanks to a surveyor named Joseph Chadwick and our busy friend Paul Revere. They collaborated to issue the engraving shown above.

On 4 July 1767, Revere entered into his account book a charge of £4 “To one half of Engraving a Plate for a Perspective View of the Colleges” and “To Printing.” Evidently Chadwick and Revere split the cost of publishing this image, and presumably the proceeds.

Harvard held its commencement every year in July. It was a public holiday, bringing big, festive crowds to Cambridge, some people because they had links to the college and others because they wanted to watch or sell things to the first group. In 1767 commencement was on Wednesday, 15 July, and I suspect Revere and/or Chadwick were in Cambridge selling their print to those who would want it most.

That might explain why Revere never advertised this image for sale in newspapers. Advertising might have been much less cost-effective at reaching reach the target audience of Harvard graduates.

Revere may also not have printed many copies. The scholar of his engravings, Clarence S. Brigham, reported in 1954 that he had found only four surviving examples, owned by the Essex Institute, the American Antiquarian Society, Harvard itself, and an individual. However, the image has been reproduced many times, so there are lots of later copies of this view hanging on walls.

In May 1775, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress commissioned Revere to engrave and print currency. His wife Rachel and most their children got out of besieged Boston early that month, and they must have brought the old engraving plates. Revere cut the image of Harvard College in half and used the reverse side to make money. That piece of copper is now at the Massachusetts Archives.

Also at the state archives is Chadwick’s journal of a surveying expedition in Maine in 1764, as recounted and transcribed (with maps) in this article.

Seasholes on “The Changing Shape of Boston,” 14 Mar.

On Wednesday, 14 March, the Old North Church will host a talk by Nancy S. Seasholes on “The Changing Shape of Boston: From ‘One if by land, and two if by sea’ to the Present.” This talk is co-sponsored by the Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library.

The Old North Speaker Series event description says:

Did you know that Boston was once a small peninsula? How did the fact that Boston was located on a peninsula affect the choices made by both the British and the Patriots on April 18, 1775? What happened to that small peninsula afterwards to transform it into the Boston of today? This talk will explore the changes in Boston’s topography from the time of the Revolutionary War to the present.

Seasholes is the expert on how Boston has physically grown over the years. She is the author of Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston and Walking Tours of Boston’s Made Land.

Right now Seasholes is directing a project to produce an historical atlas of Boston, to be published by the University of Chicago Press in fall 2019. I’m one of the many contributors she’s wrangling to get that book finished.

This talk starts at 6:00 P.M. Reserve seats through this webpage. Admission is on a “pay what you will” basis. (This was Old North Church’s previous general admission policy; it has just announced a big change.)

Rufus Putnam Lays Out “so Costly a work”

On 11 Feb 1776, Lt. Col. Rufus Putnam of the Continental Army wrote to his commander-in-chief about what would be necessary to fortify the heights of the Dorchester peninsula.

With the ground frozen, soldiers would need extra time to dig in. That in turn would mean that the army would have to protect its men against British artillery fire as they moved across the narrow neck onto the peninsula, which Putnam called a “causeway.”

And building that protection was a big logistical challenge, Putnam reported:

You have Inclos’d a Chart, of some, of the most Important Posts and Riseing ground in and near Boston, which is as Exact as I am able to make from the little Leisure I have had to take Surveys of them,

by this Draught it Appears that the Enemies works on the [Boston] Neck is nearer the Causway going to Dorchester Point, than Bunker Hill is to the Cover’d way going on Leachmoors Point, therefore if a Cover’d way was Necessary in that case, it will be in this, should your Excellency think proper to order works thrown up on any part of the point,

how this Cover’d way will be made is a Question. to procure upland or Marsh Turf at this Season is in my Opinion absolutely Impossible, and nothing short of Timber instead of Turf will Answer the purpose,

the Method I have tho’t of is to side or Hew the Timber on two Sides only raising a single Tare on the side of the Causway, raising a Parrapet of Stone and Earth next the Enemy. the Timber to be well Spliced together and if need be a post with a brace in about Fifty feet to support the Timber against the stone & Earth,

I know Stone are bad in a Parrapet, but as they are easily Procur’d from the walls at Dorchester, and I think cannot be Driven through the Timber by any shot whatever, I would place them at the bottom and Cover the top with Earth which might be procur’d by opening a Pit for that purpose

About 200 Rods is Necessary to be made a Cover’d way which 80 Tons of Timber to Raise one Foot, and so in proportion to every foot, the Parrapet is High; I have been to the Swamp I mentioned to your Excellency the other Day, find it between 12 & 13 Miles from the lines at Dorchester; there is near 100 Tons already got out besides a number of Mill Logs, the Carting from this place will be 12/ per Ton, One Hundred Tons more may be had on these lands if the swamp Does not break and no Doubt but Timber may be had in other Places,

what your Excellency may think of so Costly a work, I cannot tell, ’Tis the only method I know of, but wish a better way may be found out, I hope your Excellency will Pardon my Officiousness in suggesting that I think this work may be Carried on with safety to the people Employ’d and to the Cause in general, as the Enemy cannot take Possession of Dorchester Hill at Present. Can we by any means Raise a Cover’d way in this frozen season it will be of no small Consequence in takeing Possesion of this Ground in a favourable Hour,

the People who have been Employ’d by Mr Davis in getting the Timber out of the Swamp will get no more unless your Excellency gives Orders for it.

That plan to build a covered way along the “causeway” would be complex, expensive, and time-consuming. Furthermore, the British commanders inside Boston would surely see that the Americans were up to something well before it was done, and they would no doubt make countermoves. Even if the British couldn’t take the Dorchester peninsula as Putnam said, they had more artillery pieces and gunpowder, and they dominated the harbor.

Gen. Washington held off from signing on to this plan.

TOMORROW: The commanders visit the ground.

“Rethinking Enlightenment” through Women’s Eyes

The Houghton Library at Harvard University has opened an exhibit titled “Rethinking Enlightenment: Forgotten Women Writers of Eighteenth-Century France.”

The library’s website explains:

The French Enlightenment is famous for its intellectual innovations, but it is remembered largely as a male endeavor. However, recent scholars have shown that French women were active in all genres, from novels to physics. Despite systemic sexism, these writers produced literary and academic works that were neglected in their own times as in ours.

“Rethinking Enlightenment” showcases Houghton Library’s remarkable holdings of texts by eighteenth-century French women. Beyond describing how these writers critiqued their society, the exhibition demonstrates their active participation in the philosophical and artistic development of modern France. For scholars of the Enlightenment to anyone interested in women’s history, it is a timely reminder of the forgotten figures in intellectual history.

The curator for this exhibition is Harvard undergraduate Caleb Shelburne. He worked as a research assistant for Christie McDonald, Smith Research Professor of French Language and Literature, as she wrote a long essay on eighteenth-century women writers that will appear in Femme, Littérature. Une histoire culturelle in 2019.

“Rethinking Enlightenment” will be open until 28 April in the library’s Amy Lowell Room. It is free to the public during library hours.

Also viewable at the Houghton Library until 14 April is an exhibit titled “Landmarks: Maps as Literary Illustration.” That “brings together over sixty landmark literary maps” of famous fictional places, from Utopia to Oz.

Digital Resources from Mount Vernon

Here are some digital goodies from the George Washington National Library at Mount Vernon, which I visited last year for a symposium.

Podcasts: The Conversations from the Washington’s Library podcast usually features a one-on-one chat between the library’s founding director, Douglas Bradburn, and a historian or author who is speaking or doing research at the site.

These are in-depth interviews, most lasting about an hour. Bradburn asks about people’s latest book and ongoing research from the perspective of a fellow historian with an excellent overview of research being done in the field. He often gets into a topic few history podcasts cover: his guests’ careers in and out of academia. Some of the shows are recorded more clearly than others; a couple of times I’ve given up on listening in the car because I couldn’t make out both sides of the conversation.

After a few months’ hiatus, the podcast has just returned with a conversation with Gordon Wood, one of the most influential early American historians of his generation. (During that break, Bradburn became the head of Mount Vernon overall, so he was keeping busy.)

Interactive Map: Washington’s World is one of the many digital resources that Joseph Stoltz oversees for Mount Vernon, a map tracing all of George Washington’s travels. This map shows his known location at every point in his life, pinned with G.I.S. onto a modern map of North America.

We can thus follow Washington’s various journeys, as far west as Point Pleasant on the Ohio River (1770) and as far east as Barbados (1751). One can zoom in to the neighborhood level or out to see the whole scope of his movements. Major events have descriptive explanations and links to Mount Vernon’s growing digital encyclopedia of Washington’s life.

Because the sites are mapped onto a modern map, it’s easy to approximate Washington’s routes along today’s roads. In the case of Boston, however, the city’s modern shoreline isn’t the shoreline that Washington knew and struggled with. Still, it’s interesting to see locations pegged to all three of his visits to the city: in 1756 as a young colonial officer, in 1776 as a victorious besieger, and in 1789 as the elected President.

Lectures: Finally, I just learned that the talk I went to Mount Vernon to deliver can now be watched on C-Span’s American History TV site. It’s called “George Washington’s Cambridge Headquarters.”

The theme of that symposium was “George Washington Slept Here,” and all the talks explored different places where we know Washington spent time. The speakers brought a wide range of perspectives, focusing variously on archeology, farming, politics, surveying, war, and so on. Other lectures recorded by C-Span are:

• Natalie Larson, “George Washington’s Beds”
• Karl Watson, “George Washington in Barbados”
• Thomas Reinhart, “George Washington and Architectural Trends”
• (previous version of one symposium talk) Warren Bingham, “George Washington in the South”

The digital and physical resources at Mount Vernon will no doubt continue to grow.

Boston in 1774 with Notes from Later

Cortney Skinner alerted me to this item in the New York Public Library’s digital images collection.

It’s a leaf from Isaiah Thomas’s Royal American Magazine in early 1774 that featured Paul Revere’s engraving of the eastern shore of Boston with Royal Navy ships in the harbor.

This page from the American Antiquarian Society reports that the magazine included a key for this frontispiece inside on page 40. That key identified the labeled landmarks along the water’s edge and the ships. (Though the latter were simply “1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and 8 Ships of War. 9 and 10. armed Schooners.”)

However, this copy of the print was removed from the magazine, and sometime in the early 1800s someone created his or her own key in the margins.

Here’s the handwritten key along the left side; if the key from 1774 said something different, I put that information in brackets:

A- is Long Whf.
B- is Hancock’s Whf.
C- is North Battery
D- is Fort-hill Battery [South Battery]
E- is Fort-Hill
F- is Fosters Whf. [Wheelwright’s Wharf]
G- is the Province house [Beach Hill]
H- is Tilteston’s Whf. [Hubbard’s Wharf]
I- is Hallowell’s Ship Y’d [Hollaway’s Ship-Yard]
K- is [blank] [Walker’s Ship-Yard]
L- is Gee’s Ship Yard [Tyler’s Ship-Yard]
M- is [blank] [Island Wharfs]
N- is [blank] [ditto]

Originally there was no key for the meetinghouse and church spires dominating the top of the image, but the annotator put a lot of effort into labeling them. And I put a fair amount of effort into reading those labels, including some in pencil that required raising the contrast on those parts of the scan.

The results are:

Hollis St. Ch.

Summer St. Ch. [Though was a term for Trinity Church, that building had no steeple; this spire was the New South Meetinghouse on Summer Street.]

First Ch. Federal St.
now Dr. Channings [Rev. William Ellery Channing preached to this congregation from 1803 to 1842; this building was replaced in 1809.]

Old So. Ch. Washington
St. Dr. Eckley’s [Rev. Joseph Eckley’s tenure at Old South ended in 1811.]

Old King’s Chapel

Province house
Beacon light
Old Brick ch. now [?]
Joy’s buildings Cornhill
Sq.
Town house at head
of State St.

West Ch. (Howard’s) [Rev. Simeon Howard died in 1804, and a new church was erected on the site in 1806.]
Faneuil Hall
Brattle St. ch.

New Brick ch. Hanover
St. Dr. Lathrop’s [Rev. John Lathrop died in 1816.]

Ch. in No. Square site
now built over with
dwelling houses. In 1775
it was distroyed. [This was the Old North Meetinghouse.]

Christ Ch. Salem St. [Now best known as Old North Church.]

Dr. Elliot’s Hanover
St. [Rev. Andrew Eliot died in 1778, Rev. John Eliot in 1813.]

Those labels offer some clues about when the notes were written. The annotator put Old South on “Washington St.,” and that stretch of the street wasn’t officially renamed Washington until 1824. For the Federal Street Church still to be “now Dr. Channings” means that the labels predate 1842. So let’s say around 1830.

It’s a bit confusing that the annotator included the names of some ministers who were dead by that date. I suspect the notes were an attempt to identify who presided over those meetinghouses during the Revolutionary War, at the approximate time of the picture. In the case of Howard, Lathrop, and the older Eliot, they were indeed preaching under those spires in 1774, but Eckley wasn’t installed at Old South until 1780.

“Washington Slept Here” Symposium at Mount Vernon, 3-4 Nov.

On 3-4 November, Mount Vernon will host the 2017 symposium of the Washington Library, which has the theme of “George Washington Slept Here: Travel, Rest, and Memory of the First President.”

The speakers include:

• Philip Levy, “Where George Washington Slept: The Early Years”
• John Maass, “Soldier and Surveyor: George Washington on Virginia’s Frontier”
• Ed Redmond, “George Washington’s Manuscript Maps and Surveys, 1747-1799”
• Joseph Stoltz, “Washington’s World Interactive Map”
• Warren Bingham, “The People and Places of George Washington’s Southern Tour”
• Natalie Larson, “Battlefield to Bed Chamber: Exploring George Washington’s Beds”
• Karl Watson, “‘Hospitality and a Genteel behaviour is shown to every gentleman stranger’: George Washington’s Impressions of Barbados and Barbadians in 1751”
• Thomas Reinhart, “‘Got into Annapolis between five & Six Oclock’: George Washington among Maryland’s Architectural Trendsetters”

And toward the end of the two days I’ll speak about “General Washington’s First Headquarters and What He Learned There.” Here’s the description of that talk:

George Washington took command of the Continental Army in Cambridge, Massachusetts in July 1775. Soon he moved into a mansion that served as his headquarters for nine months – longer than any other site until Newburgh, New York. This talk explores why the general chose that house, now a National Park Service site; how he used it; and what he learned about leading the Continental cause while inside those walls. It will also discuss how later owners – the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his family – helped to preserve the public memory of the Revolution and Mount Vernon in particular.

This is, of course, quite an honor. It grows out of a historic resource study I wrote a few years back for the National Park Service. I’ll try to speak about the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site as enthusiastically as the N.P.S. staff there does.

Registration for the 2017 Washington Symposium is available starting here.

Charles E. Frye on Rediscovering Colonial Roads

Charles E. Frye is writing the novel series Duty in the Cause of Liberty to share the story of his ancestor Isaac Frye of Wilton, New Hampshire. You can read more about the project in this interview at Written by Veterans.

Frye, a professional cartographer, is taking a very data-driven approach to this story. On his website he’s mapped out his protagonist’s home neighborhood in Wilton and the territory he traveled over as a Continental officer during the war. In this blog post Frye describes how he developed those maps and what he learned by doing so.

An extract:

As I began to trace Isaac Frye’s path during the American Revolution, I needed to know where he had been, and how he got there. I also needed a map to “pin” that information to. To my surprise, many records only showed where he had been, rarely conveyed his mode of travel, and almost never indicated the specific route he took.

Thus, I undertook to find a preponderance of evidence to plausibly describe how and where he traveled. In my years of reading and research, I learned two most important things:

1. Despite not having Google Maps, smart phones, or even a current printed map (which rarely had accurate roads) to get directions, colonial Americans made it their business to know the best and fastest routes between destinations. Time was money back then too, and nobody had enough of either to waste. Time and again journals kept by soldiers and and army suppliers described routes not shown on any maps, though these routes were are often described in town histories in the sections dealing with public improvements.
2. The network of extended family and friends in the places where one often traveled mattered a great deal when it came time to plan to sleep each night with a roof over one’s head and draught animals cared for.

I also learned that roads today are not always where the roads used to be. A great many of today’s roads are possible because of advances in excavation and grading equipment. Thus, colonial roads were not nearly as level or straight as we are accustomed to.

To learn exactly where those old roads were located, there is no substitute for getting out on the landscape and walking the terrain. The remnants of stone walls (usually built in the early 1800s) are often the best clue. Once you know what you’re looking for, a sense for what a wagon or team of oxen drawing a sled could traverse in terms of slope and tightness of curves can be gained.

Frye aligned a modern digital base map with period maps by matching a handful of known points. But those period maps, while valuable, weren’t rigorously accurate or complete. You can compare a printed map of Wilton from 1784, showing four roads from the town center, to Frye’s map, with many more paths that Isaac Frye and his neighbors used.

A Filled-In Trench in Charleston?

Here’s an archeological find that caught my eye several weeks back, as reported in the Post and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina:

The Historic Charleston Foundation has been researching the rear yard behind its Aiken Rhett House property [from 1820] to learn more about how wealthy residents and their slaves shared the large area, which might have contained an ornamental garden as well as work space.

Recent ground-penetrating radar showed evidence of a pit and possibly pathways of brick, shell or compacted earth.

But it also found evidence “consistent with a filled ditch.”

That was significant because military historians knew that the British army built trenches on the peninsula during their campaign to take the port city in the spring of 1780.

A later Post and Courier story continued:

In the late 18th century, the city was mostly concentrated below present-day Calhoun Street. British troops dug trenches in the uninhabited areas farther north, allowing them to stealthily move troops across the city from the east to capture the patriots’ fortification in the area now known as Marion Square.

After the British forces seized control of the city, they filled in the trenches to keep them from being used in a counter-attack.

In the decades after the war, new streets and suburban homes, such as the Aiken-Rhett House, were built on top of the filled-in trenches, making it especially difficult for today’s historians to pinpoint where they were.

Martha Zierden, curator of historical archaeology at the Charleston Museum, said if they can verify the location of one trench, they can use old maps to estimate where all the others are buried.

On Friday, the team of archaeologists and students on Elizabeth Street got one step closer to that goal. After they finally finished removing a layer of old bricks and slate in the excavation pit, they reached the soil dating back to the 1780s that indicated the dirt had been disturbed, most likely for a trench.

“There would have been no other reason for anybody to be digging in that area because it was uninhabited in the late 18th century,” said Carl Borick, director of the Charleston Museum.

He said the area also lines up with a map of the trenches drawn by [Charles Blaskowitz,] the British Army’s chief mapmaker for the Siege of Charleston.

Two Maps of Eighteenth-Century Native America

A couple of stories about maps created or co-created by Native Americans in contact with British settlers recently caught my eye.

At Atlas Obscura, Sarah Laskow wrote about a map drawn on deerskin, now lost, in South Carolina in the early 1720s:

It depicted geographic and social relationships among the Native American nations in the surrounding area. Squares represent European settlements, with Charleston at one end and Virginia at the other, and circles in between represent Native American communities, connected by double lines that resemble paths.

This map, now known as the “Catawba Deerskin Map,” is one of the only examples of a map created by a Native American and given to Europeans. Colonial settlers reported that native tribes regularly made maps—etched in ash or on tree bark—and that this local cartographic knowledge helped the settlers develop their own maps of areas they wanted to occupy. . . .

This particular example combined geography with information about the relations between people living in the area, and some scholars argue that the paths drawn between the communities represent social and political distance, rather than geography. “This was a map that was meant to illustrate a trade relationship,” Max Edelson, a historian at University of Virginia, told BackStory radio. Edelson’s new book, A New Map of Empire, explains that the center of the map is the Catawba community of Nasaw, and Edelson compares it to the famous “View of the World From 9th Avenue” map, in which New York City takes on a disproportionate amount of space to represent its inhabitants’ view of the world.

There is some question, though, about who actually made the deerskin map. . . . Historian Ian Chambers, for instance, has argued that the map is of Cherokee origin. One of the keys to his assertion is the path that runs across the top of the map, which connects the Cherokee directly to Charleston. Trade along this connection, Chambers writes, had been logistically challenging, and a Cherokee leader had once promised a trader that “they would make a new path” to ease the way. The central position of the Catawba communities, in this theory, highlights their position as an obstacle to direct trade between the Cherokee and the British, much like a British map might put the Atlantic Ocean at the center of a map of the North American colonies and the British Isles, the center of power, in one corner.

Meanwhile, the Cornell University library spotlighted a recent acquisition “showing Seneca and Cayuga villages and native footpaths in addition to natural features” in what is now upstate New York:

It consists of three maps: a finished map of Hudson County, and sketched maps of Schoharie Creek and Seneca and Cayuga territory.

The Seneca-Cayuga map depicts Cayuga and Seneca lakes as well as six small triangles representing indigenous villages. Five of these villages are named, and all are connected by a network of dotted lines indicating footpaths.

“It’s one of the most detailed early European reconnaissance of what we now call the Finger Lakes, and what’s striking about that from a colonial/historical perspective is how late that is,” said Jon Parmenter, associate professor of history.

The map was likely created between 1760 and 1770. By then, the Finger Lakes region was well known to European colonists, but they had limited access for detailed surveying. . . .

For example, a spot on Cayuga Lake labeled “Tarry” on the map was probably a spot where people waited for canoes to come and ferry them across to the other shore. A spot near what is now Montezuma, N.Y. is labeled, “The resort of gees and ducks of all sorts all the year.”

Mildred G. Burrage’s “Attack on Bunker Hill”

This map of the Charlestown peninsula in 1775 and the Battle of Bunker Hill comes from the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library, courtesy of the Digital Commonwealth. It is made of “Painted gesso plaster, with land features shown in relief.”

The creator was Mildred G. Burrage (1890-1983) of Maine. Last year the University of New England Art Gallery in Portland had an exhibit on Burrage’s seventy-year career, which extended from studying Impressionist in Paris as a teenager to pursuing Abstract Expressionism between the world wars in the form of “mica paintings,” incorporating local minerals into her pictures, to promoting artist networks and historic preservation in her later decades.

Regional history was a big subject for Burrage. She recalled receiving drawing lessons from “a lady descended from John Hancock who had me draw one of his chairs, and cut off a piece of the red brocade to go with my drawing!” When Burrage was seventeen, her father, formerly a newspaper editor and minister, became Maine’s state historian. Later she “made recruiting posters for World War I and worked in the shipyards of South Portland during World War II,” the Portland Press Herald reported.

That newspaper article said:

The mica paintings may be the most unique work Burrage attempted, but they are not the most remarkable elements of the show. That distinction belongs to a small series of highly detailed and beautifully crafted maps that Burrage copied and displayed, rather successfully, as artwork. She began making maps after her return to Maine from Paris, and continued doing so among her other art projects into the 1930s.

They are the earliest examples in the exhibition of Burrage’s self-reinvention, [curator Earle G.] Shettleworth said. The maps spoke to both her interest in art and history, he said.

With its detail and near-perfect rendering, the most interesting of the maps is a watercolor copy of Samuel de Champlain’s engraving of “New France,” published in 1613. It includes what is now Maine and Canada. There also are copies of maps of old Portland, Cape Ann and Washington, D.C.

This map of Bunker Hill, which the library dates the sesquicentennial of American independence in 1926, is likewise based on older images. But the gesso plaster seems to be one of Burrage’s many artistic experiments, pushing her work into new areas.

Secrets of Gen. Clinton’s Map of Bunker Hill

Here’s an intriguing document from the maps collection at the Library of Congress.

It’s Gen. Henry Clinton’s hand-drawn map of the Battle of Bunker Hill.

One eye-catching detail is that Clinton sketched a small fortification on top of Bunker’s Hill, at the left of this image. (The redoubt on Breed’s Hill is at the center, as usual.)

There are even lines indicating that one of the warships in the Charles River fired at that site.

On the night of 19 Apr 1775, British troops had dug in a little on Bunker’s Hill to protect the soldiers who had exhausted themselves marching out to Lexington and Concord and back. They abandoned that area by the next morning. After retaking the Charlestown peninsula in June, the British built a much larger, stronger fortification on that site.

But evidently on 17 June, Clinton perceived the provincials as having fortified themselves there as well. Maybe New England men were taking advantage of what the British had left from April. We know there was a great deal of reluctance to leave that high ground and go down to the redoubt and fence where a man could get killed.

Also interesting is that Clinton drew this map on the back of a sheet printed with the lyrics of two drinking songs, “John Barleycorn Is Dead” and “O Good Ale, Thou Art My Darling,” and an engraved line of music.

Two Unconquered Canadiens

This title on the short list for the Wilson Institute for Canadian History’s book prize caught my eye:

Joseph Gagné’s Inconquis: Deux retraites françaises vers la Louisiane après 1760 tells the captivating story of two French military officers – Pierre Passerat de La Chapelle and Louis Liénard de Beaujeu – that chose to march to Louisiana after the abdication of the French in Montreal in 1760 rather than suffer the embarrassment of surrendering to the British.

These men, one leaving Fort Detroit, the other Fort Michillimakinac, eventually met, by chance, in Illinois country. . . .

Both men came from very different backgrounds: Pierre Passerat de La Chapelle was a young French professional solider and a provincial nobleman, while Louis Liénard de Beaujeu was a Canadian military officer that benefitted from the fur trade. Upon meeting, Beaujeu, the more senior of the two, tried to submit La Chapelle to his leadership. La Chapelle, the noble born, refused, citing that Beaujeu – the Canadian that gained a title solely through the fur trade – was not his superior. This was the beginning of a quarrel that eventually led to La Chapelle’s imprisonment after Beaujeu accused him of deserting.

The prize committee said, “Gagné offers a glimpse into the social and class politics of 18th century French military society during a time of extreme crisis [as] the chain of command disintegrated.” They also praised the book’s production with “numerous (colored!) images and maps” and said it’s “written in a very engaging style, making it very accessible to non-academic audiences.”

Non-academic audiences who can read French, of course.

Gagné, a graduate student at Université Laval, has spoken about these men at Fort Ticonderoga and other venues. He created the Electronic New France and Curious New France websites. So we can hope Inconquis is picked up and translated for American readers; after all, it’s a story about Illinois and Louisiana as well as Québec.

A Map of the Massacre to Explore

I mentioned this in a comment a few days back, but thought it deserved more space.

The Boston Public Library’s Rare Books and Manuscripts department has just made a digitized image of its overhead view of the Boston Massacre, credited to Paul Revere, available to everyone here.

The Town House (now called the Old State House) is at the upper center. The arc of circles at the right middle represents the soldiers in front of the Customs house.

As for the victims, they are laid out and labeled, with full sketches for the first four:

• 1 (looking like a J), A – Crispus Attucks
• 2, G – Samuel Gray
• 3, C – James Caldwell
• 4, G – Samuel Maverick, apprentice to Isaac Greenwood
• 5 – no initial, and kind of crossed out, in front of the Exchange Tavern
• 6, P – Robert Patterson or David Parker
• 7, P – David Parker or Robert Patterson [Not helpful here, Paul]
• 8, P — Edward Payne, standing in his own doorway
• 9, M – Christopher Monk

In addition, there’s one circle marked M without a number, a possible circle at upper right with neither number nor initial, and three victims without locations: Patrick Carr, John Green, and John Clark.

It might seem to make more sense for “4, G” to be John Green and one “M” or an unlabeled circle to be Samuel Maverick, but we know Maverick was shot at the back of the crowd where that “4, G” body is shown. Revere knew the Greenwood family in the North End, so he surely heard of the apprentice’s death on the morning of 6 March. On the other hand, he used the boy’s own initials, not the master’s, when he engraved a woodcut of four coffins for the Boston Gazette a few days later.

(For Charles Bahne’s analysis of this image in 2013, see this post.)

This diagram also labels the streets and alleys leading off of King Street, plus many of the shops and houses in that part of central Boston. We can thus get a sense of this neighborhood, with the homes of some high-powered businessmen like Edward Payne and Thomas Marshall, and shops that catered to them.

One theory suggests that Revere created this picture for use in one of the trials that followed the Massacre. There’s no mention of such a map in the court records, however, and we have unusually good documentation of those proceedings. Furthermore, by the time those trials started, Patrick Carr had died, so he should have been shown as well.

Another interesting detail is that some of the sketches of dying people resemble figures in Henry Pelham’s engraving of the Massacre, which we know Revere got his hands on and copied by the end of March. Did Pelham or Revere sketch miniature versions of the those figures on this view to create more drama than circles could impart?

Why Did Knox Stop His Guns at Framingham?

In response to my Wednesday posting about Col. Henry Knox’s arrival in Cambridge on 18 Jan 1776 (a week or so earlier than the traditional date), Boston 1775 friend Charles Bahne commented:

I still wonder how the town of Framingham fits into Knox’s route. The direct route to Boston (and Cambridge) from the west was the Boston Post Road, which in this area is basically today’s U.S. 20 with some minor detours. That road passes through Marlborough, Sudbury, Wayland, Weston, and Waltham. All of these, except Wayland, existed as towns in the 1770s; Wayland was still part of Sudbury. It would have been a significant detour — with all those heavy cannon! — to go to Framingham.

It’s more logical for John Adams and Elbridge Gerry to have passed through Framingham on their way from Cambridge to Philadelphia, since there was another road — today’s “Old Connecticut Path” — which branched off the Post Road at the Weston-Wayland line and headed directly to Hartford, bypassing Worcester and Springfield.

So we have a question of space as well as time. As part of my possible project on Knox, I’m reexamining the traditional stories about him. Among the most visible of those stories is his progress through New York and Massachusetts; the Knox Cannon Trail has been marked with large roadside stones starting in 1926. Yet much of that trail is based on assumptions about where Knox and his cargo passed because the records of his trip are incomplete. Some marker stones have had to be repositioned.

Following the first Knox biography, we assumed Knox brought his artillery from Springfield (a town he mentioned in a letter to Gen. George Washington) to Cambridge, arriving 24 January. And we assumed he took the straightest, most traveled route, which was the Boston Post Road. But that timetable is wrong. What if the route is an unsupported assumption as well—at least for the guns?

As shown in the map above (a detail from the 1775 “Seat of War in New England” map), the Boston Post Road leads east from Marlborough through Sudbury to Watertown. At Marlborough another road diverged southeast into Framingham toward Natick. It seems likely that Col. Knox directed his “noble train” along that second road. But why?

Gen. William Heath wrote in his diary that Knox “came to camp” on 18 January while the guns “were ordered to be stopped at Framingham.” To me that wording implies the order came from above—i.e., from Gen. Washington.

Another clue comes from the Gershom Foster orderly book at the Anderson House library of the Society of the Cincinnati. That’s an orderly book for the artillery regiment. The orders start to come from Col. Knox (in a big, dramatic way) on 28 January. So even though he was in Cambridge on 18 January and presumably received his commission as colonel then, Knox didn’t start directing the regiment for another ten days. What was keeping him busy?

I suspect Knox went ahead of the guns to meet with his commander-in-chief in Cambridge on 18 January, then hurried back west to meet the guns and stop them at Framingham, or divert them to that town. Why? Knox’s papers have a big gap at this point, and Washington’s surviving headquarters papers don’t mention him or the new artillery. (Notably, however, “Framingham” is one of the passwords of the day on 22 January.)

One possibility is that Knox always planned to take that road because he was aiming to deliver the cannon to Roxbury, not Cambridge. He had worked on the big fort in Roxbury. He might have expected to mount most of the guns in that part of the siege lines. In that case, the route through Framingham to Natick and thence to Dedham might make sense.

But it also seems likely that those cannon needed to be mounted and equipped for use in the siege. Washington may well have decided that Framingham was the place to do that work, far enough from the lines to be safe from the enemy. I haven’t found any mention of such work in Framingham, however.

It appears that Knox’s heavy cannon remained in Framingham for a month or so. On 26 February Ezekiel Price, a Boston official and businessman who collected many threads of gossip from his refuge in Stoughton, wrote in his diary:

It is said that the heavy cannon which were left at Framingham are brought down to Cambridge; the mortars are fixed in their new beds; the fort at Lechmere’s Point nearly finished; fascines going constantly to Dorchester; and every thing getting in readiness to make a push by our army.

Not all the gossip Price wrote down was that reliable (I’ll talk about that tomorrow). But it seems unlikely that he would have been wrong about the heavy cannon being left in Framingham for weeks.  And while it’s not clear what Price meant by saying they were brought “down to Cambridge” (Allston was still part of Cambridge then), this diary entry does suggest some of Knox’s artillery did indeed travel into that town. So there’s still a case for some of those markers.

Two Small Cannon in Lexington

In Chapter 7 of The Road to Concord I described how several towns in Massachusetts moved toward establishing their own small artillery forces in the months leading up to the Revolutionary War. After all, what traditional New England town is complete without artillery?

I included every such town I’d come across, which wasn’t easy. While the book was in proofs, Gary Gregory of the Edes & Gill Print Shop told me how he’d recently moved to Westboro and saw a cannon mentioned in its records. So I quickly confirmed that fact and squeezed it into an endnote.

I don’t claim that The Road to Concord lists every Massachusetts town that looked into buying cannon or training with artillery in the seven months after the “Powder Alarm.” Assembling such a list would require searching every town’s local history and town-meeting records, most unpublished, since there’s no central source for that information. Alas, I didn’t have the time or the grad students to do that work.

I focused on the towns close to Boston, as shown on a map in the book. Gen. Thomas Gage had received intelligence about some of those guns, and a British officer had even seen one at the Watertown bridge in early 1775. I think that adds a new layer to the British expedition to Concord—those regulars were potentially marching into the mouths of cannon.

But that map doesn’t note big guns at one significant location: Lexington. In October author Alexander R. Cain shared his findings about that town’s artillery at his blog, Historical Nerdery:

Some of the guns, mostly iron cannons, were taken from coastal defenses around Boston and sent to Watertown. While there, two of the guns caught the attention of Lexington. Its residents quickly pressed the selectmen to acquire a pair of cannons for the town.

On November 3, 1774, the town selectmen relented and announced the issue would be addressed at the next town meeting. Specifically, “Upon a request of a numbre of Inhabitants to see if the Town will fetch two small pieces of cannon from Watertown, offered by said Town for the use of the Company in this Towne.” . . .

At some point after November 28, 1774, it received the two guns from Watertown. “Voted…that the Selectmen receive the two pieces of cannon with their beds [from] the Towne of Watertowne and give receipts for the same on behalf of the Towne.” By late February, 1775, Thomas Robbins of Lexington was already making ammunition cartridges for the guns. On February 27th, the town “Granted an ordere to pay Mr. Tho Robbins 1/9 in full for his trimming the (balls) & providing baggs to put them in.”

Unfortunately, what became of the guns after February 1775 is unknown. Lexington’s town meeting minutes from the Spring of 1775 were stolen years ago.

The records of a 17 October town meeting in Watertown refer to “pieces of Cannon now lodged in the Town,” suggesting that inhabitants hadn’t bought those guns, just found themselves in possession of them. That explains why Watertown offered Lexington two of those cannon the next month. (Yankees don’t give way expensive goods that easily.)

Watertown kept two cannon for itself. And Cambridge had one gun, of unknown origin. Is it simply coincidence that the Charlestown shore battery had contained five cannon in 1770, and all the guns from that battery had vanished early in September 1774? Coming from a battery might explain why the Lexington guns still had “their beds” attached.

Simply possessing cannon wasn’t enough, though. Lexington needed to spend £40 to buy field carriages to make its two guns useful in battle. Towns also had to pay for artillery tools and ammunition like Thomas Robbins’s cartridges, and militiamen had to train to fire those guns safely. That process required time and expense. It looks like none of the towns who had moved to create artillery companies had their cannon ready on 19 Apr 1775. At least, no town deployed artillery against the British army that day.

A Key Location in The Road to Concord

The image above comes from this hand-drawn map in the collection of the Library of Congress. I’ve flipped it so the street labels are easier to read; that puts north to the lower right. You can click on the image for a bigger view or follow the link for the whole map.

The library has no information about who created this diagram, but we can deduce its approximate date from the labels on the right side. Moving from the far right, they show the locations of camps of His Majesty’s 4th Regiment (on a hillock), the 47th, and the Marines.

The Marines arrived in Boston harbor on 5 December and remained aboard ship until sometime in January, according to Lt. John Barker’s diary. Barracks were prepared for them in the North End for the winter. On 26 April, they finally camped on the Common. Barker likewise wrote that the 47th was then on the Common and the 4th upon “Whoredom Hill.”

Given those positions and the map’s lack of gun emplacements and fortifications along the Charles River shore, this map seems to date from the spring of 1775, soon after the Revolutionary War began. More British regiments arrived the next month, and the engineers began to fortify the town.

At the center of this image are two parallel lines of squiggles. That’s the Mall, a line of elm trees, along the edge of the Common. On the left side of those trees we can see streets branching off of Newbury Street, part of the main thoroughfare through town now called Washington Street.

At the bottom are Summer and Winter Streets, which still bear those names. Above them are Pond Street and Water/Watch Street. Pond Street has been built over. Other eighteenth-century maps label the Water/Watch as West Street, suggesting this mapmaker wasn’t a local; that street is still called West today. Slanting off to the right above West is “Hog A[lley].”

Where Water/Watch/West Street runs into the mall is a six-sided orthogonal shape, probably a land lot. That was where the South Writing School and the Boston militia train’s new gunhouse shared a fenced yard. Back in September 1774, two of the train’s brass cannon disappeared from that gunhouse. The British military never found out, but those guns lay hidden for two weeks inside that school. By the time this map was drawn, they had been spirited out west as far as Concord and probably Stow, and were headed back to the siege lines.

The Final “Parker’s Revenge” Archeology Report

Last month the Friends of Minute Man National Park published the final report on the Parker’s Revenge Archeological Project. I first posted about this project back in 2012 when it was just getting started, then shared periodic updates based on lead archeologist Meg Watters’s public presentations.

Now Watters has finished her formal report, and anyone can download it from this page. The Friends announced:

Technologies utilized in the research informed formal excavations and 1775 battlefield reconstructions. These methods included: 3D laser scanning, GPS feature mapping, and geophysical surveys including metallic surveys, ground penetrating radar, magnetic gradient and conductivity/magnetic susceptibility.

Taken together, the technologies enabled researchers to locate a farmhouse that figured prominently in the battle terrain, to recreate the actual 1775 battlefield landscape and battlefield features and even to model exactly what combatants could and could not see at various positions along the battle road.

Artifacts discovered included 29 British and colonial musket balls from the battle. The location and spatial patterning of the musket balls recovered enabled archaeologists to interpret the exact positions where individuals were standing during the battle—and then outline battle tactics most likely deployed.

The findings appear to validate the local tradition—stated early but without detail—that Lexington militiamen took some shots at the British column as it returned to their town from Concord. Since many of those same militiamen had been on the town common under Capt. John Parker that morning, when the regulars fired the first fatal shots of the war, a twentieth-century historian dubbed the skirmish “Parker’s Revenge.”

For folks who want to read the report, be aware that in P.D.F. form it comprises 35 megabytes of data. My download from the Friends of Minute Man site stopped several times, so I had to keep an eye on it to poke the restart button.

The report contains over 300 pages with more than 100 illustrations, most in color. Those illustrations include photographs of artifacts and researchers, maps of the field, and charts. Unfortunately—and this is the biggest shortcoming of the report in P.D.F. form—many of those maps have blurry text and lines, making them hard to interpret.

This is a scientific report and a government report (not produced by the government, but for a government agency). As such, it includes a lot of information that’s necessary for future study but may not interest more casual readers. There are a lot of blank pages, a list of every artifact found in the study, and transcripts of discussions among experts assembled a year ago.

The portions I found most interesting are:

• pages 51-65, on the original verbal sources about the event and how historians have described and interpreted it.
• the detailed recreation of the skirmish based on the new evidence, pages 153-197.
• for technical details, descriptions of the field work (pages 81-99 and 140-150) and the recreation of land use in 1775 (pages 103-121).

This project was a big undertaking. We should be grateful to Watters, the Friends and their donors, Minute Man National Historical Park, and all the enthusiastic volunteers who made it happen.

(The image above, by Kyle Zick, appears in the report. It shows the British column moving east into Lexington. See that rock outcrop at the rear center? That’s going to be trouble.)